There was only one Willow O’Keefe on this planet, and Charlotte was lucky enough to get her. She couldn’t imagine life without Willow. If she had never known her, the tale wouldbe different; it would not be the story of a mother and a daughter.There was only one Willow O’Keefe on this planet, and Charlotte was lucky enough to get her. She couldn’t imagine life without Willow. If she had never known her, the tale wouldbe different; it would not be the story of a mother and a daughter. If Willow hadn’t been born, that’s how the world would be for her unfinished.Charlotte would never have wished for an able-bodied child, because that child would have been someone who wasn’t her.Willow was not like other five-year-olds. Sometimes Willow used a wheelchair, sometimes a walker, and sometimes, leg braces. That was because, during the course of her short life, she had suffered over sixty-two broken bones, due to a disease called osteogenesis imperfecta, a condition thatWillow’s had since birth. But all Charlotte saw when she looked at her was the girl who had memorized all the words to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” by the time she was three, the girl who crawled into bed with her whenever there was a thunderstorm—not because she was afraid but because her mother was, the girl whose laugh had always vibrated inside her own body like a tuning fork. She knew people watched her with Willow and thought, That poor girl. That poor mother. But she knew, she never really pictured it that way. Sometimes she was sure that the reason people stared at Willow with her crutches and wheelchair had nothing to do with her disabilities, and everything to do with the fact that she had abilities they only dreamed of.But other things can break all the time, not only Willow's bones: glass, and dishes, and fingernails. Cars and contracts and potato chips. You can break a record, a horse, a dollar.There are coffee breaks and lunch breaks and prison breaks. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Chains can be broken. So can silence and fever. You can break the ice and from the moment the ice broke, Willow became the crystals painting Charlotte's car windshield after a night’s frost. She was the heat rising off the pavement like a ghost in the middle of the summer. She never left her mother.You can’t live a life without impact. ...Continua Nascondi